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This is sneering.
Or rather, it's the kind of sneering that people like Hanania indulge to salve their egos.
I am not ashamed to say that I am of origin a 4chan shitposter. I, of course, cannot speak for an amorphous group of internet trolls. But I'd like to think that people like me and people who think like me have no pretensions of gatekeeping the culture or its discourse. But despite this, our little internet sect - if it can even be called that - is upstream of so much of the current political moment that we are either incredibly prescient of the degeneration of propriety or we masterminded its fall and decline. The American president is a living, breathing meme. He trolls the world! And in some insignificant yet important way, we are a part of it.
Or it could be all a big coincidence. It would be just as funny.
No one outside of Hanania's little circle cares about his opinions. He's no thought leader. Not even a secret king. Trump may be master of the media cycle, but he is a boomer and ultimately of their generation. Elon is one of us. At times he may be based and other times he will be a lolcow, but the Extremely Online Right Wing Weirdos have broken into government and there is nothing the bow-tied Buckleyites can do about it.
Hanania is a former white nationalist who wrote for Counter-Currents.
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I'm not sure what any of this has to do with anything?
Analysing the tribe that Hanania belongs to may be great sport, but it is, surely, completely inconsequential to the points he makes, which the top-level post presumably wanted to discuss?
In short: he's coping and seething because he is not the court philosopher of the people in power.
In the long: it's no longer 2012. You don't get points for Noticing, no more than you get credit for being a geocentrist in this day and age. Whether Hanania likes it or not, Elon Musk has actually accomplished things. What has he done? Suffered in the desert of barely acceptable discourse for a decade, and when he emerges he isn't treated as a prophet, with respect. He's a nobody, a has-been. Elon brute-forced his way into the president's cabinet to dictate policy, while Hanania snipes at him on a substack. Who is he to say about competence, about anything? Sure, it's not debate club rules, but writing furious tracts on how Elon is a drug addict that is crashing out isn't exactly gentlemanly, either.
Even if Elon is a tenth of the man he was when he started up SpaceX, he's still vastly more influential and powerful than Hanania was on his best day. In the real world, this matters. There is a long history of intellectuals waging personal grudges in the public discourse against their enemies. Nearly all of it is uninteresting.
I'm just going to repeat myself - what does that, even if true, have to do with anything?
I haven't speculated on Hanania's private motivations, in the depth of his soul, because I don't care about them. He's a guy who commentates on politics, and he's provided commentary here. Either that commentary is true and useful, or it isn't, and in neither case does it matter what you think his private dreams and aspirations might be.
Hanania has commented negatively on Musk's character and behaviour. As far as I can tell those comments are well-grounded in observable evidence. What more do you need?
Yes, Musk is "vastly more influential and powerful than Hanania". This is true. This is, in fact, the whole reason why it is appropriate to write articles in Unherd about Musk's character, addictions, changing behaviours, etc., and would not be appropriate to publish similar analyses of Hanania. Musk's character, behaviour, choices, etc., affect vastly more people in the real world, and therefore it is both fair and necessary to subject Musk to closer scrutiny.
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The question is why discuss anything Hanania has to say at all? If it's not inherently interesting (and I don't think it is), it would have to be because Hanania is someone to pay attention to. And IMO (and I said this some months ago), he's not.
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